THE TRIAL angrily ordered his assistants to resume their places and hold their tongues. The last thing he wanted was to antagonize or frighten the girl so that she would refuse to talk. For over an hour there was quiet as Joan recounted in matter-of-fact tones her adventures between leaving Domremy and coming to Chinon, until . . . "and after dinner I went to the king, who was in his castle. When I entered the presence chamber I recognized him from the others through the guidance of my Counsel, and I told him that I wanted to make war against the English." She had made a slip, since the king had refused to see her for several days, and Beaupere knew it, but he was not bothering with trivialities. As if earnestly trying to fix the scene in his mind he asked, "When the Voice pointed out the king, was there light (the celestial radiance she had mentioned earlier) in the room?" For a moment the man in the robe and the girl in tunic and hose studied each other—even now one feels that one could have heard a pin drop in that room. In the brief lying under Beaupere's sound left hand was evidence, pieced together from many morsels of gossip, that Joan and the Dauphin between them had cooked up a fraudulent sign to convince the public of the divine origin of her mission. Just what form the sign had taken he did not know, except that it had to do with an angel and a crown, but he intended to find out, for it would be child's play to expose it. The sign was the political crux of the trial as the Voices were the touchstone of Joan's guilt or innocence. Unfortunately for the prosecution, she knew it. By some incredible flair she suspected the drift of questions almost before they were uttered—already on that day 253